AERTEC announces the award and development of an important contract, in consortium with the company GMV, for assessing the safe and autonomous termination of RPAS flights. This project called SAFETERM is sponsored by the European Defence Agency (EDA) and has an initial definition phase of six months.
The project will assess the different technological and certification approaches to RPAS autonomy.
Operations in non-segregated airspace are an important need for military RPAS for both training and operational purposes, and EDA is a major European stakeholder in this field.
RPAS autonomy is a key technical factor for integration into airspace, particularly for emergency situations where remote pilot intervention is very limited or even not possible.
SAFETERM's objective is to evaluate different technological and certification approaches concerning the autonomy of RPAS with the objective of ensuring a predictable, yet adaptive, behaviour of the aircraft in case of an emergency leading to the termination of the flight. In particular, SAFETERM will focus on emergencies involving multiple failures, including loss of C2 data link, i.e. without remote pilot intervention.
Despite the potential use of this capability in a wide range of RPAS, the platform to be targeted will be a large or medium altitude long endurance (MALE) tactical RPAS type, with a maximum take-off weight (MTOW) above 500 kg, operating fully integrated with the European Air Traffic Management System (ATM).
This functionality is expected to use autonomous control algorithms, as well as to make intensive use of machine learning techniques to detect, classify and model the environment required for autonomous flight of a large RPAS.
#uas
